About

Our Mission

We believe everyone in South Carolina has a story to tell and that every story creates the beautiful tapestry of our community life and history. The Communal Pen collects those stories to build a state-wide story library.

Through the Communal Pen, the unheard and underrepresented voices of South Carolina can find a home and be heard. Our mission is to create a stage and bring a sense of togetherness to everyone who calls South Carolina home. As people, we cannot survive in isolation, and the Communal Pen invites everyone to reach out and connect with their local community. Together, we can forge new connections and find community through the shared history of life in the South.

We come together and lift the stories up from the marshlands and farms, the islands and the mountainous corners of the state to write together, with one communal pen.

The History of Communal Pen

The Communal Pen became a partnership between the Athenaeum Press at Coastal Carolina University and the South Carolina Arts Commission in 2023, but the initiative is over six years old.

Communal Pen workshops were developed by the South Carolina Arts Commission, in partnership with the South Carolina Humanities Council, to connect the Smithsonian’s traveling exhibits, Museum on Main Street, with their host sites through storytelling. Every other year, one exhibit travels among South Carolina communities where they are hosted by diverse venues, including libraries, museums, and historical societies. Past Communal Pen Writing Workshops have been developed with Museum on Main Street exhibits Crossroads: Change in Rural America, Water/Ways, and Voices and Votes: Democracy in America. Laura Marcus Green, former Folklife and Traditional Arts Director at the SC Arts Commission, partnered with poet and jazz performer, Eboni Ramm and folklorist and writer Michelle Ross to develop the workshop structure and prompts. Green, among her extensive work in community-based initiatives, had participated in and facilitated workshops with Write Around Portland, an Oregon-based initiative that builds creative community through writing. Write Around Portland kindly consulted and offered their materials and guidelines as inspiration for the Communal Pen model.

During the Crossroads exhibit tour Ramm and Ross traveled to each site with the Museum on Main Street, collecting stories and a strong community base for the workshops. When the COVID-19 pandemic prevented in-person gatherings, the team seamlessly moved the workshops online, developing much-needed connections and community building for participants around the state. Workshop participants from Charleston to Greenville could now connect and share stories, creating wonderful dialogue about the subtle differences and commonalities across the region. While initially, Communal Pen workshops only took place while the Museum on Main Street exhibits toured, the team also conducted independent workshops on foodways, music, and the holiday season between exhibits.

The Athenaeum Press came to the partnership with its own experience in the power of storytelling. Established in 2013 as a student-driven publishing lab, the Athenaeum Press has completed over 20 projects and initiatives based in community-collaborative storytelling and experimental media. The Press’ projects range from museum exhibits to 360 documentaries to traditional publications, and they are completely researched, edited, and designed by students. Many of the projects involved original archival and community interviews, much more than could be put into an exhibit or short book. Press Director Alli Crandell and Creative Director Scott Mann knew that the stories they had discovered were essential parts of the fabric of South Carolina and needed to be shared. Crandell and Mann successfully applied for and received a planning grant from the National Endowment for Humanities to explore how to better document and share their “dissertation projects for days.”

The partnership with Communal Pen was a natural fit. The Press had experience tackling archival projects to make the past collections of Communal Pen more visible to a wider audience, and the SC Arts Commission was looking for new models of Communal Pen workshops. Together, we are working to expand and continue the legacy of community storytelling throughout South Carolina (and beyond).

Where We are Going

Over the past year, we have found an unmet need for models to listen to stakeholders or collect community stories. We believe that Communal Pen, with its guidelines and open model, can create amazing stories that will enhance our understanding of our region and build community.

If you are interested in getting involved in the Commual Pen initiative, please visit our Get Involved page.

Organizational Partners

The Communal Pen project is funded in part through a partnership with the South Carolina Arts Commission, which receives support from the National Endowment for the Arts.